an eyebrow. ‘I must have missed that.’
After three tense hours on the phone, pacifying everyone from the British Institite of Race Relations to the American Screen Actors Guild, he’d walked the forty minutes into Loxley village to try to clear his head. Stopping at the pub had been an afterthought, but he was glad he’d had it. The landlady waddled over. Dorian ordered a malt whisky for himself and ‘the same again’ for Sabrina, who instantly tensed.
‘For Christ’s sake, relax. If I didn’t fire you for this morning’s papers, I’m not going to fire you for having a drink. Just don’t make a habit of it.’
The drinks arrived. Dorian raised his glass. ‘To our movie.’
Cautiously, Sabrina did the same. ‘To Wuthering Heights.’ After a short pause, she added, ‘I’m not a racist, you know.’
‘I believe that,’ said Dorian, truthfully.
‘That’s why I didn’t want to apologize to Tarik Tyler. I know I should have. It made me look so much worse, not saying anything for so long. But it would have been like I was admitting I said something I never said, you know? Like I viewed people a certain way because of their colour. It’s bullshit. So what if his grandmother was a slave? My grandmother was a crack whore, but you don’t hear me banging on about it.’
After months on the wagon, the alcohol was quickly going to her head. Not only was she babbling, but she found herself staring at Dorian in a way she never would have if she’d been sober, examining his features closely for the first time. When he wasn’t scowling, or shouting, he was actually quite attractive in a rough-and-ready, Sean Penn kind of way. Of course he was old, and certainly not handsome in the way that Sabrina liked her men – no one was going to sign Rasmirez up to model Calvin Klein underwear any time soon, that was for damn sure. But there was definitely something about him.
‘So why are you here?’ she asked him.
‘Same reason as you. I had a shitty day, I needed a drink, and this is the only pub in town. Plus, a friend told me not to drink here, which of course made me curious to try it.’
‘A friend? You mean Tish Crewe?’ Sabrina asked archly.
‘Yes, as it happens.’
‘You like her, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ said Dorian, either missing the insinuation or choosing to ignore it. ‘I like you too, Sabrina.’
This was too much for Sabrina, especially delivered with such a straight face. She laughed so hard she choked on her drink, spraying vodka and tonic all down the front of her blouse and narrowly avoiding giving Dorian an impromptu shower.
‘Really?’ she spluttered, cleaning herself up with a napkin. ‘I’d love to see how you treat actresses you don’t like.’
‘I treat them exactly the same,’ said Dorian. ‘I’m not in the business of favouritism. If Viorel or Lizzie or Rhys had been all over The Sun this morning, I’d have yelled just as hard at them.’
Sabrina looked at him sceptically.
‘It’s true. You personalize everything, Sabrina. I’m not your enemy. If it’s an enemy you’re looking for, try the mirror.’
Sabrina opened her mouth to argue with him, but decided against it. She was too tipsy to defend herself properly, and anyway it made a nice change to be having a semi-civil conversation.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ said Dorian, taking a long slow sip of his whisky. It was delicious.
‘Tell you what?’ said Sabrina. ‘The sob story? Rags to riches? Doesn’t everybody know that already?’ She put on her best whiney, facetious voice: ‘I’m Sabrina Leon, and I’m from a bwoken home.’
Dorian just looked at her, arms folded. Waiting.
‘You really wanna know? OK fine.’ Sabrina jutted out her chin defiantly. ‘My mom was a heroin addict. Dad was a petty thief and general, all-round douche bag, or so I’m told. I never met him. I first got taken into care when I was eighteen months old.’
‘First? You went back to your parents?’
‘To my mom, twice. The first time she left me with “friends”, who tried to sell me to pay off a drug debt.’
‘Shit.’ Dorian had heard this story from Sabrina’s agent, but had assumed it was apocryphal.
‘The second time the neighbours called the cops after I almost died climbing out of a second-floor window. Mom’s boyfriend was hitting her round the head with a frying pan. I thought I was gonna be next.’
‘How old were you then?’
Sabrina took a sip of her drink. ‘Three.’
Saskia’s age.
‘By five they made me a permanent ward of the state. Which pretty much saved my life, although after that I was constantly on the move, bouncing around from one foster home to another.’
‘What were they like, your foster parents?’ asked Dorian.
Sabrina smiled. ‘Which ones? There were the Johnsons. They were nice. I lived with them for a year and a half until their older daughter got fed up with sharing her bedroom and they dumped me back on the doorstep of the children’s home like an unwanted Christmas puppy.’
Dorian winced.
‘Then there were the Rodriguez family. The dad, Raoul, believed in “old-fashioned family values”. That basically meant beating me with a bamboo cane across the backs of my legs when I was late home from school, or left food on my plate.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Dorian.
Sabrina smiled. ‘Yeah. It wasn’t the Waltons, but it was better than the next place. The Coopers.’
‘What happened there?’ asked Dorian.
‘Their son, Graham …’ Sabrina began, then broke off suddenly. ‘You know, I don’t really wanna talk about it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter ’cause I ran away and spent the next two years on the streets. Which actually wasn’t as bad as it sounds.’
‘How old were you then?’
‘Twelve,’ said Sabrina matter-of-factly. ‘I got off the streets at fourteen, but I learned a lot in those two years.’
I’ll bet you did, thought Dorian.
‘Such as the fact that men are assholes who only want one thing,’ Sabrina went on. ‘Luckily, they’re also mostly idiots, so if you’re smart you can use that filthy, one-track mind of theirs to your advantage.’
It was an unusually frank confession. Dorian could imagine just how many men in Hollywood Sabrina Leon had manipulated over the years to claw her way to the top. Now he knew where she’d learned her skills.
‘It was acting that really saved me,’ Sabrina continued. ‘A guy named Sammy Levine ran a youth-theatre company on the outskirts of New Jack City, where I was living at the
